Constructing the global constitutional canon: Between authority and criticism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The future of global law seems currently in doubt. Despite this development, and indeed partly because of it, comparative constitutional law and human rights are blossoming as academic disciplines. This makes it a good moment to ask if global constitutional law (by which I mean to refer both to comparative constitutional law and international human rights law) has a canon and whether it needs one. I argue that we do not as yet have much in the way of a canon but that we need one or, at least, a debate about one. I begin by offering a first and tentative assessment of the state of the debate and then discuss in more detail what type of canon might fit global constitutional law. I reject the more traditional, religious conception of a canon as an assembly of normatively authoritative texts as incompatible with comparative law. I argue instead that a canon of global constitutional law should fulfil three key functions: (a) serving as a disciplinary platform establishing the foundations of a shared discourse among comparative constitutionalists and human rights lawyers; (b) encouraging self-reflection by making room for different voices and criticism as well as giving us a sense of the historical development of our fields; and (c) supporting the normative agenda of human rights and democratic constitutionalism. From this, I draw four factors relevant to the canonical status of individual judicial decisions in global constitutional law. Finally, I examine the famous US decision Obergefell v Hodges as a candidate for a global canon as compared to other decisions on same-sex marriage, thus applying my previous arguments to a concrete case.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".